Amazon Glacier – dirt cheap backup storage if you can wait a few hours to retrieve it

The only down side is that this is like a safety deposit box at the bank. You have to wait until Monday, or one of the two or three Mondays out of the year that bankers actually work, to access your assets. But you knew that ahead of time.

The good news is that the cost of using Amazon Glacier for long term large scale data storage looks very low at .01 cent per gig per month. So a photographer with 6 TERABYTES of data, hypothetically speaking, would pay a mere $61.44 per month to safely store that data. And you wouldn’t put it all in one vault as a six terabyte download would be a pain. Maybe keep everything under 300 gigs and organized. That would make retrieval reasonable IMHO. Amazon says “4 hours to retrieve or more” which given the low price seems fair.

Jeff Bezos is one smart man. Smart enough to hire Werners Vogel for one, who was brilliant when I saw him speak at eTech in 2007. I didn’t understand then when Jef and Werners moved into the “software as a service” as a commodity at eTech all of those years ago. Now I send them large checks every month on behalf of our company and our clients. Well played and a great value for all of us. Tip of the hat to a visionary.